The Tully UFO UAP legacy
Danielle O'Neal and Piia Wirsu of the ABC Expanse podcast series have focused on the famous Tully UFO milieu in Series 4 over 5 episodes. They have done an excellent job in presenting the general essence of the story, while largely focusing on the human side of this fascinating saga.
The series was introduced as follows:
In 1966 a salt of the earth banana farmer in far north Queensland saw something he couldn't explain. It looked like a flying saucer and it left behind a circular mark in some reeds, which he called a 'saucer nest'.
That moment became the inspiration for an international alien hoax, it subjected him to intense ridicule, and it exposed him to the whole chaotic debate about UFOs.
(Posted Saturday 7 December 2024)
It's 1982, and a young UFO researcher is sitting in a director's office at the Department of Defence headquarters in Canberra eager to get his hands on information he's been dreaming of for years — the Australian government's UFO files.
Wearing slacks and a tie, with a tidy short haircut, Bill Chalker wants to demonstrate this is a serious scientific endeavour.
Then he sees two postal sacks full of files being dragged into the austere government room.
There they are.
The secretary leaves the room and Bill hurries to get to work, documenting what he can.
"But that inspection was interrupted by them returning, saying, 'Uh, we've got a bit of a problem here. We just need to, uh, declassify them'," Bill says.
"I was told that these files hadn't been declassified yet and you weren't allowed to look at them.
"So, they went off and some poor harried person had to spend the next hour or two hurriedly stamping every single page 'declassified' with an autograph and I just thought, you've got to be kidding."
RAAF's UFO files
Up until the 1990s, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) was responsible for investigating UFOs — then called Unusual Aerial Sightings — in Australia.
Over the decades, the RAAF received thousands of reports from civilians, researchers and military personnel.
In the wider context of the space race and the Cold War, the air force was interested in this information.
"Not because the RAAF had any insight into a threat from aliens or green men … but rather there was a very real Cold War imperative … to be able to understand the early days of space, rocketry and satellites," says former RAAF intelligence officer Brett Biddington.
"There were very real-world reasons for air forces to want to enlist public help to find objects that might have come back from space that had human origin."
The RAAF would investigate all manner of reports and documentation would end up in the UFO files.
Most UFO sightings and encounters could be dismissed as being caused by mundane things like weather, but there was a small percentage of cases that remained unexplained.
Those were the cases that interested people like Bill — who wanted to know what these UFOs and unexplained phenomena were.
Bill says accessing detailed information from the RAAF was almost impossible for interested civilians.
"They might send you the odd couple of files, heavily redacted," he says.
"I was keen to get beyond that."
Accessing the files
In the early 80s, Bill — who was working as a chemist in food science — found himself bedridden with a case of appendicitis.
"It was during the recovery of that that I thought, what the hell, I'll start doing a ringing campaign to the Department of Defence and keep it up until I get a response," he says.
"Taking no was not an answer and I just kept at it.
"I finally got a response saying, 'Yeah, OK. We'll organise some access to the files.'"
It took about a year of badgering, but at 9am on a January day in 1982, Bill walked into the Russell Offices in Canberra, the administrative headquarters of the Australian Defence Force and the air force.
He would spend a week looking through the files and documenting relevant cases, which, after the minor hiccup on day one, were declassified.
What he found? Well, he says a lot.
Bill saw references to a secret report in 1954 by a nuclear physicist, Harry Turner, commissioned by the air force.
"[Harry Turner] was asked by the Director of Air Force Intelligence … to do a scientific appreciation of their early case data," Bill says.
"From that data, and upon comparing it to US data that he got access to, he concluded that a residue of the data represented evidence of extraterrestrial craft."
Other files gave an insight that some in the RAAF saw the investigation of UFOs as a burden on resources.
There were also cases Bill was already aware of that he wanted to get to the bottom of as he dug around in all these files — one of which was a UFO sighting at the North West Cape US communications base in October 1973, reported separately by two employees at the base.
"What was seen by the deputy commander of the base and the fire captain was way beyond any kind of aircraft, drone or whatever may have been available to the military at that time … certainly according to the lieutenant commander," he says.
But when Bill examined the UFO files in 1982, that case was missing.
"So they'd been obviously removed at some point, but we clearly knew that there was evidence for this case," he says.
Cased closed
Not without controversy among interested civilian groups, the air force closed its UFO files in the 1990s.
"I was challenged to think about what was core and not core in the context of the intelligence function," says former RAAF intelligence officer Brett Biddington.
"Unusual aerial sightings, when there's no evidence of any threat that is extraterrestrial, was not core business.
"And so, logic drove me to eventually recommend to the chief of the air force that we would save a little bit of effort within the intelligence function in the air force if we desisted or no longer worried about unusual aerial sightings.
"And that's why the policy ended up being changed."
Official systemic UFO investigations never really kicked off again in Australia.
The UFO files were sent to the National Archives of Australia, hundreds of which are digitised and available online.
In the United States, UFOs — now termed UAP — are back on the agenda in a big way, with the US Congress holding its third hearing into UAPs last month.
In the public interest and because of its significance as a historical & cultural archive (in case they get deleted off the ABC site) I have posted the Uncropped episode transcripts here:
Transcript:
Episode 1:The Sighting
Danielle O’Neal VO: There’s this sugar cane farm in far north Queensland. It feels isolated, private.
About 5 minutes' drive from the farmhouse is a lagoon. These days bullrushes just cling to the edge of the murky brown water. But 60 years ago, it was thick with them.
Something happened in those bullrushes that’s still unanswered today. In fact, the questions it raised ended up becoming so much bigger than the mystery itself.
This all starts with a roar on a clanking old tractor and a young farmer who saw something he couldn't explain.
Shane Pennisi: He turned around and looked up and what he saw was something that I don't think he ever forgot. It just went above the tree line and then it took off.
Danielle O’Neal VO: It was 9am and the sun was already belting down on this young farmer sitting on his grey Ferguson tractor in a bushies hat and button up shirt.
His pulse was racing and locked him rigid with fear.
And now he was looking at the mark it supposedly left behind.
Shane Pennisi: He saw reeds and water swirling. So he just rubbed his eyes and said, ‘I must have been dreaming’.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Right in the centre of that lagoon, the bullrushes were all pushed down – this circular depression where the plants were flattened.
Shane Pennisi: It was that neat you would have thought someone had of woven it. It was about a 22-foot diameter nest. That was the biggest saucer that had landed in this lagoon.
Danielle O’Neal VO: It was called a saucer nest back then. Now we call them crop circles.
They’ve been burned into popular culture along with E.T. and the X-Files and flying saucers filled with little green men.
There aren’t many people left who can tell me what really went down out there on the lagoon that day.
One of the last was seven years old when it happened. But he had a front row seat. I’m desperate to find out what he knows.
Flight attendant: Please remain seated with your seatbelt fastened. The local time is 8.34.
SFX - Car starts
Danielle O'Neal: There we go, up there. Hello.
Danielle O’Neal VO: I'm meeting a journalist colleague of mine Chris who hails from these parts. Well, he lives two hours away in Cairns
But in Queensland everything's a long way from anywhere, so we’ll call him local-ish.
Chris Calcino: I love Tully. It's like it's just been carved into the side of a mountain up there at Mount Tyson.
Danielle O’Neal VO: People might know Australia for the big red expanse of the outback - that’s where I’m from. But this is another kind of Australia.
Chris Calcino: You can see these gigantic rain trees, which are just absolutely beautiful. They spread out horizontally. Called rain trees I think because that's where you go when it rains.
And that's what they say in Tully. If you can see the top of the mountain, it's about to rain. If you can't see the top of the mountain, it's already raining.
Danielle O’Neal VO: We're driving through the sugar-filled mists hanging off the mountain to meet a man I've only spoken to once before. That seven-year-old who was caught up in this wild story, Shane Pennisi.
All he said then was that he couldn't say what he needed to over the phone, but if I came to Tully we could have a cuppa and go from there.
Shane’s never spoken publicly about what happened here on his family farm.
Honestly, I’m nervous about how this is gonna go.
There’s no ‘ABC how-to guide to making a UFO podcast’, but probably not a great look to catch two flights and drive two hours all to come back empty handed.
Chris Calcino: I'm pretty excited actually because Shane sounds like he's going to spill a few secrets that not too many people would have heard over the years.
Danielle O'Neal: When did you first hear about the story on this property that we’re going to?
Chris Calcino: Six years ago or something. I was working at the Cairns post and I even like the word saucer nest. I've never heard of heard of saucer nest before.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The story I'm here for is as much about the people and the place as it is about this unsolved mystery from six decades ago.
Chris Calcino: That’s the top pub. A few ratbags around, it's probably my favourite one.
Danielle O’Neal VO: As we make our way through Tully, and let’s be honest it doesn’t take long, I think about how what happened here must have shook it up.
What happened to that young farmer inspired an international alien hoax long before ‘misinformation’ was a term people dropped in casual conversation.
it subjected him to intense ridicule that feels very familiar in today’s pile-on culture.
And it exposed him to the whole chaotic debate about UFOs.
What happened created a lot of scar tissue in this little town. Even today people won’t talk.
Danielle O’Neal: We’re specifically looking into what happened in Tully in 1966 do you know what I’m talking about?
Danielle O’Neal VO: Even telling people about what project I'm working on can feel a little weird. 'Cause you say ‘UFO’ and people react in a very particular way.
I've heard some crazy things as a journalist, and Journalism 101 is to approach topics like this with skepticism, sometimes even cynicism.
But I want to find out what happened here in Tully, and the more I do the more I realise that this story isn't an alien story. It's a human story.
A story about how we even talk to each other when everyone comes at the conversation with their own version of the truth.
Which feels like a deeply relevant thing at the moment. I mean, have you been online lately?
What happens, when people say seemingly unbelievable things?
I'm Danielle O'Neal and this is season four of Expanse: Uncropped. Episode one, The sighting.
Danielle O’Neal: I think this is the right house, this is where it says on the map.
Chris Calcino: Here we are.
Danielle O’Neal: Alright.
Chris Calcino: We have arrived.
Danielle O’Neal: I might turn off this microphone so we don’t scare Shane off. This goes
Danielle O’Neal VO: We've pulled up in front of a single story, grey-blue rendered home with a large front verandah.
It’s completely surrounded by cane and the tracks for the cane trains even cross over their driveway.
Shane greets us with hugs. He seems warm and... relieved.
Maybe because we haven’t come brandishing kilos of camera gear.
Within minutes, percolator coffee is brewing on the stove and we’re offered homemade scones by his wife, Deb.
We talk about this year’s cane season – it's been delayed because of pay negotiations at the mill, where the water came to during the many recent floods. The usual small talk in these parts
Honestly, I’m taken aback by how normal this scene is. The house, the chat, the pleasant couple in their 60s who live here still farming a relatively small cane crop.
At some point Shane just turned to me, looked at my recording equipment, and said ‘You gonna turn that thing on?’. There's a lot he needs to get off his chest.
Shane Pennisi: It's alright, it's just another thing my brain will ponder over and say, am I going insane or something?
(laughter)
Danielle O'Neal: We might just check our volume, okay? I might get you to count down from 10.
Shane Pennisi: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, thank you.
Danielle O'Neal: Sounding good. Are we recording?
Chris Calcino: We are recording.
Shane Pennisi: Walking down the main street of Tully in the early days, you'd have to push your way through it. When I was a young fella it was a hive of activity.
Danielle O’Neal VO: I hear in Shane this same fierce pride that I’ve clocked in a lot of the people from Tully.
As one local – someone I’ve heard described as the unofficial town mayor – put it.
Ron Hunt: I've got a saying that when God built the world and built the earth, he got to Saturday afternoon and he said, ‘Oh, I haven't built a place for myself’. And he turned around and built from Ingham north and that was his place. So, we're living in his place.
Danielle O’Neal VO: God’s place. Built on cane, cattle, bananas and logging.
It’s also wet. Like, really wet. The wettest place in Australia, depending on who you ask. They’ve even got a massive 8 metre high gumboot in the main street to underscore the point.
There are these quirks to the place that make it very endearing. Like how not wearing shoes is a thing. Even when people are farming.
I can only imagine the impact it had when this spotlight of unwanted attention was headed their way.
And that spotlight would be scorching for a young, shy farm kid. Seven-year-old Shane, dressed in the hand-me-downs of his older siblings.
Shane Pennisi: Now's the time for the public to know.
Because it was just not only a nest in a lagoon. It involved people and a lot of heartache.
Danielle O’Neal VO: One of those people was Shane’s dad, Albert Pennisi.
Shane Pennisi: Mother told me a story once. On the way to Cairns, a group of them pulled up at Gordon Vale to have breakfast and there was an old derelict walking past.
And she said she happened to notice Dad grabbed a hard-boiled egg, put it in a piece of bread and held it behind his back for the man to take.
Because Dad knew what it was like, he'd been there. That was my dad.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Shane’s dad Albert was in his forties, strong, handsome, about five nine.
Shane Pennisi: My father was my best mate.
(breaks up)
Sorry.
You could go and ask him anything and he would help. He was like that.
Danielle O’Neal VO: I wish I'd got to meet Albert, he died a few years back. He sounds like a real character.
I’ve heard their farm described as a social hub. The Pennisi family dinners around their laminated maple dining table are famed around these parts.
And you absolutely could not drive past without popping in to say g’day.
Sounds like Albert was just that kinda bloke.
Honestly it could be the ‘old time’ nostalgia, but life sounded pretty idyllic. Until it wasn't.
And it all starts with George.
Shane Pennisi: George was just there. Yeah, it was just part of the family.
He was a good-looking guy. Your typical Australian man from Snowy River
He never said a bad word.
Danielle O’Neal VO: George Pedley was a young bachelor in his 1220s who’d kind of become part of the furniture at the Pennisi's. He was definitely a regular at family dinner.
George was their neighbour. He worked the land next door, built a shack and carved out a living growing bananas.
He’s the last person anyone would have expected would come up with the story he did.
January the 19th dawned, the sun already climbing, the fog disappearing from between the still sugar cane.
There was another hot, humid day on the way.
The Pennisis wanted to find some relief and all five of them climbed into the family station wagon, headed off to their shack by the beach.
The whole family, that is, except Bully.
Shane Pennisi: The dog was going berserk he was barking early in the morning and everything.
I still remember jumping up and just bow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Going berserk, barking and running around in circles.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Something was up with Bully, settle down mate.
Three kids loaded in the back, windows down, they headed off for the day
Shane Pennisi: We'd come home late that afternoon to find George sitting on our front steps.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The sun was going down as the car pulled into the worn patch of earth used as the driveway.
Shane could see George, neatly dressed, bushman’s hat in hand as always, sitting there on the thick, wide concrete steps leading to the verandah.
Shane Pennisi: It wasn't George. He was uneasy.
Danielle O’Neal VO: One look at his face told young Shane there was something up.
George was shaken.
Shane Pennisi: Um, George was a pretty confident guy. George used to joke
Danielle O’Neal VO: There were no jokes tonight.
Shane Pennisi: He started stuttering a bit and he wasn't sure. He was serious. Something had happened.
Danielle O’Neal VO: As the kids cascaded out of the car, Shane and his brother dawdled to try and find out what was up with George.
Shane Pennisi: He'd been there most of the day apparently.
He talked to Dad and then he'd come out with what he'd seen and what had happened.
Dad said, ‘Jump in the ute George, we're going to have a look’.
Danielle O’Neal VO: There was no way Shane and his brother, Adrian, were missing this.
Shane Pennisi: We jumped in the ute, in the back. It was an old EH Holden ute, greeny khaki colour.
Kids always traveled in the back of the ute those days.
Mum and George and Dad were in the front because they had bench seats. We didn't have that much sun left.
Everything was normal until we pulled up and there it was.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The thing about a remote cane farm is that there's no artificial light. At all.
Shane Pennisi: There's no phones, there's no, no electronic gizmos, no nothing.
It gets dark down there, you can't stand around too long. The mosquitoes are just vicious.
Danielle O’Neal VO: That’s putting it lightly there’s so many mosquitos they could practically lift you up and carry you off.
Albert pulled the ute up at a horseshoe-shaped lagoon with thick reeds lining dark green water.
The dusk wind picked up, crunching cane stems into each other.
Shane Pennisi: I remember George getting out slowly, and there was the nest.
We all walked over there and it was just numbing. The rest of the lagoon was just full of bull reeds all standing up and there was this nest sitting there.
I didn't know what the hell was going on. All I saw was this thing in the middle of the lagoon.
I didn't know what they were discussing. I didn't understand what George was talking about.
It was bull reeds, it was swirled around and it was, it was just not a mangled mess. It was just like, I explain it as your cotton woven shirt. It looks like something was spinning.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Circular. Perfectly sharp edges. About 30 foot across. The bullrushes entirely flattened. Woven even.
Danielle O'Neal: What was the vibe?
Shane Pennisi: What the hell? Can I say that? What the hell?
It was daunting, because when you are there with the guy who saw it and he's looking at you white in the face, yeah, you kind of don't take it as a joke, eh?
We were only young kids, so we didn't know the implications of it or what caused this.
Later Dad said, ‘Oh stupid, I should have listened to the dog. He was trying to tell me there's something down there because he was going berserk’.
We jumped back in the ute, came home. George stayed for dinner.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The adults sat around the wooden dining table, scene of so many light hearted gatherings, while Shane and his siblings were at the kids table piecing together snippets of overheard conversation.
Shane Pennisi: George was going through our property to get to his.
Danielle O’Neal VO: He was bumping along on his old grey Ferguson Tractor, about nine in the morning.
Shane Pennisi: To the left and right of him, tall cane.
As he came out of the cane onto the lagoon on the roadway, he heard a tremendous hissing. And so he thought, ‘Oh, damn it, I've done another tyre’.
So he hopped off to see which tyre it was. And he walked all around his tractor. The tractor's still going. Couldn't find any leaks in the tyre. Pondered a bit.
He heard the hissing getting louder and louder. Then he turned around and looked up.
He saw a UFO. Just above the tree tops, tilted like it hesitated, and then, gone.
That was it.
Then he looked back in the lagoon and saw the water swirling.
Danielle O’Neal VO: George’s pulse sped up, his whole body was tensed, throat tight. He was literally rigid with fright. He couldn’t even swallow.
He tried to pull himself together.
Shane Pennisi: George being George, just thought, ‘I'm just seeing things’.
Danielle O’Neal VO: In an effort to shake off what had just happened, he went down to his little shack for smoko.
The whole jolting ride on the tractor this vision was playing in his head.
Shane Pennisi: He had his cup of tea, billy tea, and it got the better of him and he came back to have a look. To see if he was just imagining things. And that's when he saw the nest.
It was just this perfect circle in a mass of bull reeds in the lagoon all by itself.
Danielle O’Neal VO: There was a lot to talk about over dinner.
George was relieved to be taken seriously.
Earlier that day he’d run into two friends at the servo and told them what he’d seen.
They thought it was a great joke and ribbed him about it enthusiastically. ‘Maaate, you’ve spent too long in the tropics!’.
But when he took them down and showed them the mark, they changed their tune – even pushing George to tell the cops.
An idea that was now being thrown around the dinner table with Albert.
Danielle O'Neal: What was the adult's demeanor that night?
Shane Pennisi: I think just to take a second breath and say, ‘Okay, what do we do about this?’.
Danielle O’Neal VO: But this story was about to be taken out of their hands.
Peter Salleras: Boys, there's a flying saucer nest. George Pedley's seen a flying saucer...
David Macdonald: ...You've only got to look sideways at someone and bloody the town's humming, it spreads like bloody wildfire...
Erroll Gallant: ...in the kitchen having coffee. The corn flakes...
David Macdonald: ...No such thing as a flying saucer...
Valerie Keenan: ...Was it a UFO?...
Ron Hunt: ...The Bush Telegraph...
Valerie Keenan: ...farm implement to do something like that...
Ron Hunt: ...if you haven't got a good story, well, you make one up...
Valerie Keenan: ...take us and show us something...
Erroll Gallant: ...possible unidentified flying objects...
Ron Hunt: ...if you went for a beer in the afternoon, you got all the gossip.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The Tully bush telegraph was humming with the news that banana farmer George Pedley had seen a flying saucer.
Shane Pennisi: If you want something to be known in Tully, you drop it in the top pub. And it's just snowballs.
Danielle O’Neal VO: And the rumours were flying.
Shane Pennisi: Crocodiles fighting, helicopter flying upside down. One person said, ‘Would your father...?’, we made it. I don't know how.
You know, this is some of the stupid things people come up with
Danielle O’Neal VO: Young and shy seven-year-old Shane had woken up the day after they’d found George as white as a sheet on their front steps, with no idea what was about to descend on his home.
Shane Pennisi: I often wonder what mum and dad really did put up with. They never spoke about it. They just sucked it up and carried on.
Danielle O’Neal VO: They’d all gone back to the lagoon at the crack of dawn, this time with the local copper Sergeant Moylan.
Once he’d headed back to the police station, the rest of them were back at the house, cups of tea on the dining table and George was trying to explain again what he saw the morning before.
He reached for the crockery.
Shane Pennisi: It was a whitish Royal Dalton and I think it had a kind of a silver pattern on it.
And he said the only way I can describe it was two saucers, one on top of the other.
Danielle O’Neal VO: This is a pretty incredible moment. These rural cane farmers using the good china to try and make sense of something inexplicable. Something that sounds like a scene from a sci-fi movie.
A flying saucer sighting. A circular, swirled mat of bullrushes left behind. And George watching on shocked.
As they were sitting there, word about this wild story was already leaking out.
And George and Albert were about to be swept up in the hysteria that was brewing.
When they contacted the cops, they had no way of knowing that it would change the course of their lives. Or how far their story would travel.
This is Uncropped, season four of the ABC’s Expanse podcast.
We’d love you to tell your friends about the show. It helps us get discovered so other people can come along on the ride too.
I’m Danielle O’Neal, host and producer. This episode was written by me and my supervising producer Piia Wirsu. Sound engineer and producer is Grant Wolter. Executive producer Blythe Moore. Thanks to Dominic Cansdale and Chris Calcino for additional production.
This podcast was recorded on Gulgnay and Inningai land.
Episode 2: Who is visiting?
Shane Pennisi: We're sitting in the dining room, through those windows.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Once the word was out through the bush telegraph that George Pedley had supposedly seen a flying saucer on Albert’s property, and it had left a mark behind, people just started arriving at the Pennisi’s farm.
Shane Pennisi: Dust. I'm not kidding. Dust. It was one car after the other. Hundreds. Hundreds. Mum couldn't put the washing out.
They went down there, they parked anywhere they could, walked over plant cane. They climbed through into the scrub over there, broke down trees, things, they just walked through the lagoon.
As soon as I heard, they just had a bug in them to come and have a look.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Young shy Shane, dressed in his too-big hand me downs watched on, wide-eyed.
His dad, patient, kind-hearted Albert, was fending off the questions that were flying like bullets.
Shane Pennisi: Did you see it? What do they look like? Are they aliens? And all they could say was, ‘I've seen what you've seen’.
They wanted to hear answers. They wanted to hear an answer. Well they couldn't give it to ‘em.
I didn't like it at all. I just wanted to get the hell out.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Albert asked the police if they could stop the hoards from coming.
Shane Pennisi: He just looked at dad and said, ‘Unless I put my men here I think we're going to have a hell of a job. We'll have to put a whole big fence around, and barricade around the whole farm’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Instead, Shane's parents decided to shelter the kids as best they could.
Shane Pennisi: It was a no brainer. Just get away.
Danielle O'Neal VO: They packed up the station wagon and headed back to their beach shack, Albert going back and forth to take care of farm business.
I wonder if at this point, they started to get a glimpse that everything had changed.
The circular, swirled, matted reeds left behind by... whatever George saw. It turns out that was only the beginning.
There were other mysteries brewing. Ones that would leave Shane looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.
Everyone was trying to answer the question, ‘What happened out there?’. But I’m beginning to wonder if the better question is really, ‘What the hell happened next?’.
I’m Danielle O’Neal, and this is episode two of Uncropped.
The local cop, who' d gone out to the ‘saucer nest’ site with George, Sergeant Moylan, had called the the Royal Australian Air Force when he’d got back to the station.
They were the ones who looked into these reports of unexplained aerial sightings.
Moylan wrote up a report.
Report (read): In this matter I formed the opinion that the depressed area in the swamp grass had been caused by a small helicopter and that the observer, in the early morning bright sunlight shining on the rotor, may have mistaken the shape.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Once his report landed with the air force, further communications were labelled ‘restricted’.
Meanwhile, the media was doing what the media does. This was a story too good to be true.
The headlines wrote themselves.
Flying Saucer seen near Tully
Saucers are here again!
Did a saucer land here?
Saucer ‘nests’ riddle
Danielle O'Neal VO: The papers carried pictures of the circle, reeds splayed and flattened, under splashy headlines.
George and Albert were a national sensation.
And the Tully library still has those clippings.
Danielle O'Neal: This is the one from the Woman's Weekly, Her article is all about how she just got bitten by so many mosquitoes.
Danielle O'Neal VO: A collection of everything to do with George's saucer nest. And everything that followed.
Danielle O'Neal: I don't like these cartoons. It's like a cartoon with little alien men in a flying saucer.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The cartoonist has drawn a farmer, George presumably, as this kind of big-chinned, long-nosed bogan.
Danielle O'Neal: Oh, there's the original story I think. Yeah, we've seen that one. What legitimate scientist is going to go and study that if that's the portrayal it is getting in the media?
Danielle O'Neal VO: As I go through these reports and cartoons I'm starting to get a sense of the skepticism and ridicule.
Whatever you think of what George reported, it’s a pretty brutal response.
Originally George was quoted in a lot of these articles. But soon after, he said no to pretty much all media.
I don’t take this to mean he didn’t care any more. What happened out there on that lagoon clearly mattered to him, right up to his death a few years ago.
Even today, people in Tully are really protective of George because of what he went through.
Valerie Keenan: I'm sorry, George Petley was an honest man. He wouldn't have made it up.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Valerie Keenan’s a long-timer from Tully. She was a kid when this wild story took over her town.
Valerie Keenan: It became an intrusion in his life. I don’t think he would have made it up, he wasn’t that kind of man.
I think a lot of people from out of town were unfair to him. I think a lot of locals supported him, but I do think that it was a really hard time for him.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Which is why only a few trusted locals in Tully were let in on what happened next.
Valerie Keenan: We'd come from Davidson Road out onto the highway and then down to the farm. There was a gate you had to go through, just an old, rutted old track, a bit of grass growing up the middle.
VO: Valerie, her dad and brother were in the car with George under sunny skies.
It was a few days after this mysterious circular saucer nest, as it was being called, appeared.
They’d been invited along by George to come and check something out.
Valerie Keenan: We had to walk through grass, 10, 15 minutes.
There's a photo here I've got that shows where the main pad was. Well, if you go from the photo towards the back and around we walked right through heavy tea tree scrub, and there was another lagoon on the other side.
And we saw another three pads, different sizes, different shapes.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Three more unexplained circles
Valerie Keenan: It was just like something had come down from above and where we saw the other three there was no way in the world you would have got a vehicle of any kind in there.
And then we're left again with another question in our minds.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The questions were piling up..
Peter Salleras: I've never been into science fiction. Cause it's bullshit basically. I more like factual stuff or stuff that can happen.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Peter Salleras was a kid too when the Tully saucer nests appeared. As you can hear he’s pretty straight down the line.
But then, George.
Peter Salleras: I just remember as a 12 year old thinking, you couldn't do this if you tried.
I have no doubt that George was telling 150 percent of the truth.
And I wouldn't say I've seen anything that even goes close to being as, as so unexplained as that nest.
Danielle O'Neal VO: And David Macdonald, in his 20s and something of a tracker he would get called in to find tourists lost in the thick Queensland bush.
So, he was pretty used to picking up small details.
David Macdonald: I've been through scrubs and swamps from here a hundred kilometres that way and more that way. And I've never seen nothing like it before.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Everyone was asking, what the hell was going on? Would George really have created such an elaborate gag?
It doesn't matter who you speak to in Tully, everyone says the same thing. He’s just not the sort of person to make shit up.
Still, investigators were struggling to cut through the hype to work out exactly that: was this banana farmer having them on? Just what had caused this mysterious mark?
A few days after the first saucer nest appeared, 13-year-old Erroll Gallant was sitting at the kitchen table, eating his cornflakes before school in Innisfail, about half an hour’s drive from all the action.
His dad, Ken, wasn’t the sort of man to sit down and chat over breakfast.
The way Erroll tells it his dad was an... exacting man.
The sort of bloke who played eye spy with his young kids, to win. I spy something starting with... E, I.
Erroll Gallant: Electrical insulator. Were we ever going to get it?
Danielle O'Neal VO: So it seems very on brand to me that he was a part of the Civilian Military Forces, sort of like the army reserves.
And in that capacity, he was the man called in to officially investigate after the local copper made his report.
To get boots on the ground and try and get to the bottom of this outlandish story that was coming from this little rain soaked country town, Tully.
Erroll Gallant: He was just being an eyewitness for people down south. They believed they could take his word at 100 percent of what he saw and what he witnessed and he would supply photographic evidence to them.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This report Ken put together, which judging from his eye spy game would have been meticulous, was handed up the military chain.
But Erroll has these memories of his dad being pretty hacked off about the response.
Erroll Gallant: It was put in the papers that, uh, the official version that it was, uh, ducks swimming around in circles that had burnt the grass off.
Yeah, he was quite disgusted. He'd come home and said, ‘Look, you know, this is really something that we should be looking into seriously’.
And, you know, they just sort of brushed it under the carpet.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The investigators take was in. There’s nothing to see here.
Correspondence from the secretary of the Department of Air said investigations hadn't turned up anything significant.
They reckoned the most likely explanation was weather. Willy willies or water spouts.
This George guy must have been mistaken.
But, the people who knew him and the landscape weren’t satisfied by that explanation.
They trusted George. And his account.
He's not who you might imagine when you think of someone who’s be likely to see a UFO. Not a tin foil hat in sight.
David Macdonald: The only one I know that you have to believe was George Pedley
Danielle O'Neal VO: These days David MacDonald has white hair and keeps his reading glasses in the front pocket of his work shirt. But back in 66 David was a young man who'd see his mate George around town or at the local dance.
Honestly? He's one of the few people who will open up to me about George.
I'd love to sit down with George and hear what happened to him first hand, but obviously I can't.
I can only imagine how cutting this mockery must have been for someone so honest though.
I was hoping to speak to George's family, people close to him, to understand what that was like. But to this day they don't speak about George publicly because of what all this did to him.
David Macdonald: They say ‘You're a nut’, ‘You're, an idiot’, you know. ‘Go and see a shrink’, things like that. ‘Did you see anything or not? You're an idiot’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: There were weeks of endless questions, jokes, and media coverage.
And then something far more earthy hit. A big flood.
So, with all of that he walked away from his little slice of land adjoining the Pennisis.
From the shack he'd built with his own hands.
The banana farm he'd poured years into.
He gave it all up in the hopes of finding a fresh start.
David Macdonald: Albert told me he went out and helped him move his stuff out of the shack.
Danielle O'Neal VO: He packed up and started again, 30ks away.
But it wasn't going to be easy for George to leave behind the legacy of that January morning.
There was no way the media was letting go of a story this good.
Because anything space-related was a money spinner in the 60s.
It sold papers.
The race to get man on the moon was in full flight.
And the telly, if you were lucky enough to have one, was airing Lost in Space and the Jetsons.
Flying saucers and UFOs were hot!
Archival news reporter: So far I haven't seen anything even vaguely resembling a flying saucer or even a flying cigar. But thousands of people, in fact millions, do believe they exist.
Archival news reporter: What do you think they are?
Archival woman: They are real. They come from the other planets. Some of them might come from the centre of the Earth.
Danielle O'Neal VO: So heady times for a young banana farmer to see something he described as looking like a flying saucer.
Valerie Keenan: Dad was always interested in those kinds of things. He used to subscribe to magazines from America about unknown phenomena.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Young Valerie, who George had let in on the secret of those other saucer nests grew up a bit out of Tully on the big expanse of a cattle property.
A good place to see the night sky.
Valerie Keenan: Dad would take a chair out onto the lawn. It was quite open, this is Mount Tyson here which is just behind us, and our house was further back this way, but big expanses of cattle plain.
But, he would sit out on the lawn in this chair and observe the night sky and talk about what he would do if a UFO landed. And, you know, wanted to take, take us away or wanted to do scientific research or whatever. And he was always keen to, you know, why not?
Danielle O'Neal VO: Valerie was at home one evening when a call came through, on the family's landline with a spiral dialler- an essential for the mid 1960s.
Valerie Keenan: Dad's brother rang from Townsville and said that he'd been told about this star in the sky that was moving in odd ways.
And Dad had an old grrader that was wall surplus. So we climbed up on top of that because it was the highest thing around
Danielle O'Neal VO: The night air had a chill.
Valerie Keenan: And we eventually found it, a star.
It just moved up and down, sideways, at an angle, different ways, up and down around the place.
Danielle O'Neal VO: And then...
Valerie Keenan: This thing, this star, it just went. Like a shooting star, but up, up into the sky and away from us.
And I got really scared, absolutely terrified, and started to cry ‘cause it was something that obviously Dad couldn't explain. And it was something I certainly couldn't understand.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This isn’t the only story Valerie has, and she is by no means alone.
It seems like whoever you talk to in Tully, just about everyone has a story about some weird experience.
Ron Hunt: Did I come home and tell you about that light, Love? I was agitated about it.
Ron’s wife: Yeah, you were.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This is another Tully institution. That ‘unofficial town mayor’ Ron Hunt.
Ron Hunt: When I was driving the truck across the Tully River bridge I saw this light come down below the mountaintop level. And it was low, and it just went from west to east, and I was like the Mayor of Hiroshima. I said, ‘What the hell was that?’. The hair in the back of my neck went up.
Danielle O'Neal VO: But most of these people, they kept their experiences to themselves. Because who wanted to cop what George had, right?
I'm starting to get this sense of what the aftermath of this moment was like for the people in Tully.
After I'd chatted with Shane for a while about what he experienced as a seven-year-old, we jumped in his battered farm ute and he took us down to where it all started.
Shane Pennisi: Okay, so this is what we used to call the first, first lagoon, the first crossing.
You imagine when it's flooding, so you'd have to walk down and try and get across.
And sometimes it's quite eerie, you know, especially going through the water ‘cause you're always nervous. You always got to stop and look around behind you to see if a handbag is following you.
Danielle O'Neal: A handbag?
Shane Pennisi: A crocodile.
Danielle O’Neal: Ohhhh.
Shane Pennisi: This is Horseshoe Lagoon.
Danielle O'Neal: Are you feeling okay?
Shane Pennisi: No, yeah, I'm just contemplating what I should say and what I shouldn't say.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Shane, his entire family really, have been sitting on a lot of secrets for a long time. And not just what happened in January 1966.
Shane Pennisi: It mostly happened in the wet season.
Danielle O'Neal VO: A few years after the hundreds of sightseers had flocked to their farm, now 10-year-old Shane was out walking with his dad Albert.
Shane Pennisi: We would have to walk down the farm. Usually when it was flooding or there was, the water was up. We'd do that early in the morning, taking rifles.
Danielle O'Neal VO: They were for the crocs, sorry, 'handbags’
Shane would trail along through the swarms of mosquitoes behind Albert, who was carving a path through the water, rifle held high over his head.
Shane Pennisi: I'd walk behind him and the whole, whole of his back would be just black. And they're all a big swarm around your head and around your body, and they're all full red - blood.
Danielle O'Neal VO: At first, nothing. Almost as if everything was back to normal.
But then, wading through these croc-infested, mosquito laden swamps...
Shane Pennisi: We started seeing a few more landings, markings.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Sorry, more nests?
These aren’t the-ones Valerie saw with George. This was years later.
Shane says these nests kept coming.
Never as big as the first saucer nest. But still, striking and strange.
Shane Pennisi: You know that buzz you get? The tingly feeling? So even as you're walking down sometimes, I'd get this, ‘Oh, there's something there’.
We all had this sense on this farm, anyway, you get around, down to there and you look around, ah, there it is.
It's something you can't explain.
That's when Stan Sears was really in the scene then.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Stan Seers was the president of the Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau. For obvious reasons he was quite interested in what was going on at the Pennisi's.
In February 1969, Albert called Stan to let him know he'd found another nest in Horseshoe Lagoon.
Stan caught a flight from Brisbane to Cairns as soon as he heard, arriving into the farm late at night. It was pouring down rain, of course.
At daybreak, the weather was fine and Albert drove Stan down to the lagoon on his tractor.
He used all the film in his camera taking photographs of it,Brisbane.
This became somewhat of a protocol when Albert noticed another saucer nest on the property. Call Stan Seers and document everything they could.
Shane Pennisi: It wasn't just one landing or two landings there were several, many.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The Pennisis attributed these circles, landings, to more UFOs visiting the farm. Although, they never had a UFO sighting like George had.
Shane Pennisi: W at gets me is how they know when to land, when there's no one around.
Danielle O'Neal VO: That’s a good question, and it goes to the heart of the UFO conundrum. With all these people looking for them, how do we not have concrete evidence?
But still, there was a curiosity in Albert about whatever they were.
Shane Pennisi: There was a real upset that he never got to meet them.
And I still use this to this day, he said to me, ‘If you find the tractor, stopped in the paddock and not me anywhere, look on the mud guard to see if UFO is written in it and if you see UFO written on the mud guard or in the dust don't worry, I've gone for a bit of a spin’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The idea of some visiting life form creating these marks is obviously a very different explanation to the official conclusion that it was weather.
As they documented these circles that kept appearing, Albert and the family kept it all underwraps. After what happened last time.
Albert just kept his own private record.
Shane Pennisi: Dad just kept on marking it down and documenting it.
Take a note where it was. Walk home, mark it in the book. Date. Time. Roughly how big. Whether it was small, medium or large.
It was only an exercise book. You don't make anything obvious, hey? Just in case.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this sense of distrust coming through in the way Shane is telling me this story. Just in case of what?
As we speak, there's moments where he pauses, and then leans in as if he's letting me in on the secret.
And what he tells me, I don’t really know how to take it.
In 1969, to see if they could find out what the hell was going on Stan Seers had organised quite a high-tech sounding camera to be rigged up down at Horseshoe Lagoon.
Shane Pennisi: So it would shoot across and the movie camera would get three quarters of the lagoon.
It was always on. There was, Dad would always go down if the battery was getting flat, he would change the battery over and check on it every day.
Until one day, one morning he went down, there was another marking and the camera had gone off. It had run through the whole film.
Danielle O'Neal VO: A whole reel of film, of.. whatever was making these markings.
Shane Pennisi: Packed it up, took it into the Tully post office to post off because it had to be developed.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This is where the story gets complicated.
As it’s told, when that little film canister arrived at Kodak in melbourne it was empty.
Shane Pennisi: It was intercepted at Tully Post Office.
Danielle O'Neal: How did you find that out?
Shane Pennisi: I think Dad started investigating, and ASIO had a man put in the Tully Post Office. That's what we were told.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Then? Shane says Albert was given the tip off - from an ex-military guy - that their whole family was being monitored because of what happened that January in ‘66.
Shane Pennisi: Didn't realise it. But, that didn't worry Dad. As he always said, ‘I've got nothing to hide. What am I doing?’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: I must admit, my alarm bells are going off at this point. What have I got myself into? ASIO?
It was starting to feel like we were entering conspiracy theory territory. Shane didn't have much in the way of evidence for this massive allegation of long-term government surveillance and interference with the post.
Danielle O'Neal: Did you get the film back at any stage?
Shane Pennisi: Never. Never. And after the 30 years or something when we were allowed to ask for documentation and stuff back, it was refused and I think he was told there was nothing on it. So, why wouldn't they even just let him look at the film?
Danielle O'Neal VO: Hang on a sec, you mean they admitted they had it?
Shane Pennisi: Yeah, they said it was empty.
Danielle O'Neal: How did this communication happen?
Shane Pennisi: I can't, I can't remember. But I remember Dad being disappointed.
All he wanted to do was see what was on that film.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Honestly, my first journalistic instinct was to leave all this out. Because that's often how things work in the media
If it doesn't fit the story, or is complicated and takes too long to explain, you cut it out. Or write around it.
But I feel like this is important. Because we can’t understand people if we only know half the story.
Even if what we’re hearing sounds, frankly, bananas. So, instead I pulled this thread.
I've been able to ascertain this:
1. The Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau, headed up by Stan Seers, was of interest and monitored by ASIO in 1959.
Seriously, it’s there in black and white in the national archives. So it doesn’t seem outrageous to me if this was still happening ten years on.
2. Stan Seers wrote a detailed account of the film's disappearance in an article published that same year. In it he said the police even got involved to try and get some answers. According to another UFO researcher the local MP did too.
3. There was a UFO folklaw in the 60s that if you see a flying saucer, don't send the images to Kodak because they'll be confiscated.
And to me this could go either way. Maybe it happened a bit, or maybe the story has been told enough times that it’s come to be taken as truth.
And lastly Albert was interviewed himself about a decade ago saying he still didn’t know exactly what happened to the film.
The national archives have said they don’t have anything in their database matching a search for ‘Albert Pennisi’, with reference to ASIO.
I’ve also asked ASIO to confirm these allegations. They declined to provide an on the record response.
So it’s hard to conclusively say what was, or wasn’t, happening.
Nothing I’ve found is proof of foul play. But it does make me understand why those initial claims that sent off alarm bells in my mind might not seem so outlandish, especially to Shane.
Danielle O'Neal: What were they worried that your dad was doing? What were they worried about?
Shane Pennisi: Ah, I'm not really sure, but it was all about whether he was falsifying stuff. Whether he was a scam. That's what I gathered.
How could you make that? You can't make a marking like that. Was he going to do it just for his own pleasure?
Danielle O'Neal VO: I get the sense from Shane that the only thing that will put his mind at ease is if the authorities confirm his version of events.
Shane Pennisi: Everything had to be in a code after that film disappeared. So Dad would ring Stan Sears up and tell him, ‘Your relations have popped in’.
And, Stan said, ‘Oh, how long are they staying?’.
And Dad would say, ‘Oh, just a couple’.
And that meant had two markings. Lo and behold, two days after Stan would be up.
Danielle O'Neal VO: We might never know if this cloak and dagger was necessary.
But, the impact of their lived experience of all this on Albert, on young Shane, that’s undeniable.
And it helps me make sense of why they have been so tight-lipped about all this for so long.
And why they want to get to know someone, look them in the eye over a cuppa, before they open up.
The legend of what had happened in Tully just continued to grow. It was now one of the ‘classic cases’ of UFO lore.
So, in the early 70s when this young, slightly ragged, surfy-looking dude in T-shirt and cut-off jeans turned up, Albert was cautious.
Bill Chalker: It was a bit of a hot day, storm clouds looking as though it was going to beat a path to the door.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Bill Chalker had a beaten-up old backpack slung over his shoulder, scuffed from being dragged in and out of apple carts and ute trays on the great post-school surf trip.
Albert walked up to the gate to intercept him, machete stuffed into his belt at his side.
Bill Chalker: A lot of people thought he was a bit intimidating.
Danielle O'Neal VO: In this gruff voice Albert called out;
Bill Chalker: 'Whatchya doing here, mate?’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Bill introduced himself.
Bill Chalker: I'm just this weird guy that had this long-term interest in UFOs and I'm really interested in what really happened rather than how the media reported it. So, uh, he liked that, I think.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Albert opened up his doors and invited Bill in.
This tanned and long haired surfer, not your stereotypical UFO-guy.
But Bill had been fascinated by what had happened in Tully.
Bill Chalker: By then it had, was almost legendary; Horseshoe Lagoon. Particularly amongst the UFO community.
Danielle O'Neal VO: Albert introduced Bill to his sons, including Shane, and took him on the grand tour of the lagoon.
Bill Chalker: It was sort of, uh, pretty brackish at that stage. I was already up to my neck, one of Albert's sons that said, ‘Oh, better be careful there because we've got taipan snakes’.
I launched myself out like a missile or a UFO coming outta the water.
I said to him, ‘You could have, you could've told me about that before I went in!’.
Danielle O'Neal VO: The taipans didn’t dull Bill’s enthusiasm for investigating. He never really stopped looking into unexplained aerial sightings and physical trace cases.
And there were a lot more sightings about to land. What had started in Tully was about to go global.
And Bill wanted eyes on what the government had. The secret UFO files.
Where all the restricted correspondence and reports, like the one Erroll’s dad Ken put together, were stored away safely out of sight.
Were the answers in there?
Bill Chalker: We've got a bit of a problem here. We just need to, uh, declassify them.
Danielle O'Neal VO: This is Uncropped, Season four of ABC’s Expanse podcast.
If you’re loving the show, follow it and tell your friends. It helps other people discover and enjoy it too.
I’m Danielle O’Neal, host and producer. This episode was written by me and my supervising producer Piia Wirsu. Sound engineer and producer is Grant Wolter. Executive producer Blythe Moore. Thanks to Dominic Cansdale and Chris Calcino for additional production.
This podcast was recorded on Gulgnay and Inningai land.
Episode 3: The UFO Files
Danielle O’Neal VO: In 1973, a white Torana packed with three young men was cruising along a highway in South Australia, a long way from Queensland. They were headed to a little place called Bordertown.
Keith Basterfield: It was summer. It was blue skies, no clouds, completely clear.
Danielle O’Neal VO: It was good farming country, a blur of livestock and crops passed their windows as they sailed by.
They’d packed a spirit level and a Praktica film camera.
Keith Basterfield: We're all in our late teens, dressed in jeans and t-shirts because of the weather.
Danielle O’Neal VO: They turned off into a long dirt driveway, the wheels crunching on the gravel.
Keith Basterfield: Surrounding the farmhouse were just acres and acres and acres of oat crops.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Keith Basterfield was one of those teens, excited and looking out the window at the golden crop waving in the breeze. That's what he’s here to see.
Keith had moved down under with his family from England five years earlier, and brought with him this fascination with the sky.
Growing up he’d spent hours gazing out his bedroom window at the expanse above him.
Keith Basterfield: The night sky was absolutely beautiful to look at and that got me interested in astronomy and the inevitable question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’.
Danielle O’Neal VO: A question that led to this white Torana pulling up at a typical country farmhouse in 1973, dust billowing in their wake.
Keith Basterfield: The farmer himself he came out when he heard the car pull up to his drive.
Danielle O’Neal VO: In that broad Australian accent of someone who works the land, he said;
Keith Basterfield: ‘Right, well, we'll go out and have a look’.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Keith and his mates followed this South Australian crop farmer as he led them through the paddocks of oat. Just like George had led Shane and Albert to that lagoon seven years earlier.
Keith Basterfield: You could hear a rustling sound as you pushed the crop apart. We were all fairly silent, just wondering what on earth he was going to show us.
And then he simply said, have a look.
We came across a freshly made, swirled circle where the crop had been pushed down in an anticlockwise direction and woven like a mat.
There was no footprints around it, there was no other markings. It appeared that it would have had to have been made from the air, because there was no way of getting through the crop without damaging the crop.
Danielle O'Neal: How did you inspect it there on the ground?
Keith Basterfield: I sort of just knelt down, uh, touched the crop, ran my fingers underneath the matting, lifted up the matting.
And then he said, come and have a look at the next one.
Danielle O’Neal VO: One by one, the farmer reveals seven of these flattened, woven patches in his crop.
Keith Basterfield: And they seemed to be of different ages, and they didn't form a regular pattern. They were in a bit of an arc formation.
We thought, well, what on earth are we talking about here?
Danielle O’Neal VO: It was seven years since the small, wet town of Tully in far north Queensland had exploded into the headlines with claims of a flying saucer and a mysterious, swirled circle left behind in some reeds.
And now, in another state, with another farmer, it was happening again.
That wasn't all.
In the years after George made that now infamous report, accounts of strange encounters and physical traces left behind flourished across Australia.
Archival UFO sighter: I thought, ‘Gee, the moon's bright tonight’, and I looked up and I saw this thing
Archival UFO sighter: Well, when I first saw it I thought it was a plane.
Archival UFO sighter: I just had to believe the circumstances. I mean, the three of us saw it. We were all sober.
Danielle O’Neal VO: When George and Albert contacted the cops they had no way of knowing that it would set off a chain of events, spawning a phenomena that would chase them for decades.
And everyone was looking for answers.
Answers that might be held in the government's UFO files. The record of all the sightings and reports – just like from Tully – gathered from right around the country and locked away, out of sight.
But there was one person who wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He wanted eyes on those documents, classified or not.
I'm Danielle O'Neal, this is Uncropped. Episode three: The UFO files.
Standing baffled, surrounded by a swaying oat crop, the young Keith Basterfield wanted to understand what he was seeing.
So there he was, with spirit level and camera, documenting.
The more we talk, the more I realise that inquiring, questioning, is a big part of who Keith is. He’s got a scientific mind, always wanting to try and test and verify.
Keith Basterfield: We said, ‘Well, can we see if we can make one?’.
Danielle O’Neal VO: They used their feet to try and replicate the crisp swirls of these mysterious circles.
Keith Basterfield: It was obviously completely different and it looked amateurish and man-made compared to the actual circle that we saw. So it really puzzled us.
And then we spoke to the farmer and he said, ‘Well, one thing I'm going to tell you is that a couple of weeks ago, over this very paddock, I saw a red light one night. Very unusual red light, and it was just above the crop. And then it went away’.
And he never saw anything else. And then, when he was out looking at his crops, he came across the circles.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Now this is the part of the story where the inclination can be to just kind of ease gently out of the conversation, but it wasn’t the first Keith had heard about this kind of thing.
He’d been checking out and investigating unexplained sightings for a few years now. And that scientific brain wanted to know, what were these unexplained flying objects?
The circles of disturbed earth, they were tangible marks he could examine. That he could test and try and verify.
But getting people to open up about it, or even report it, in this climate?
Archival news reporter: Well, so far, I haven't seen anything even vaguely resembling a flying saucer or even a flying cigar.
Danielle O’Neal VO: With this coverage?
Archival news reporter: It's not that everyone thinks he's seen a flying saucer, far from it. Many townsfolk think it's a huge joke.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Good luck. A big chunk of the media was openly dripping in skepticism.
Archival news reporter: Maybe it is the beer, at least it's one explanation for seeing things.
Archival news reporter: What do you think about this flying saucer of business generally? Do you think it's a bit of a laugh?
Danielle O’Neal VO: Inevitably these cases made for a good yarn. But, there were people open to... possibilities.
Archival news reporter: The Victorian Flying Saucer Society meets every month to discuss and assess recent sightings.
Archival UFO sighter: I didn't believe in them. I made fun of them until I saw this one.
Archival UFO sighter: They come from the other planets. Some of them may come from the center of the Earth.
Danielle O’Neal VO: And the key organisation tasked with trying to tease all these reports apart and work out what was fact and what was fiction, or at least unverifiable, was the Department of Defence.
More specifically, the Royal Australian Airforce. The RAAF.
Every report made, gathered up, noted down. George’s strange experience filed alongside hundreds of others.
And Keith? Well, he kept doing his own investigations and sent a bit of work the air force's way.
Keith Basterfield: We had a relationship in South Australia, for example, with a lieutenant whose job was to collect, uh, UFO reports and to analyze them.
We had several chats with him. He took us seriously.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Even so, as the years passed Keith started to suspect the RAAF was on a different page to him.
There was this report he made, he documented 4 firsthand experiences, wrote it all up in a technical report, submitted it, and...
Keith Basterfield: The Air Force explanation was ignis fatuus, which is Latin for swamp gas. And we thought come on, five people, three different vehicles, all reporting the same thing. Seriously, swamp gas?
And that's when we knew that the Air Force really wasn't interested in looking for any unconventional explanation amongst their own reports.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Although, according to reports the RAAF was looking into things. And a warning, this archival has a wild music choice.
Archival news reporter: The RAAF has investigated nearly 600 UFOs in the past 12 years. Only 1 percent have been inexplicable.
But if there really are aliens circling overhead, one wonders why they would choose a quiet country town. Melbourne, perhaps Canberra, but why Traralgon?
Danielle O’Neal VO: Keith worked out pretty quickly that a lot of the people he was speaking to realised what they were saying sounded kinda nuts.
Keith Basterfield: The farmers at first wouldn't talk to us. They didn't want to talk about strange things like UFOs.
Danielle O’Neal VO: A few years before he was walking around that oat paddock trying to recreate the flattened circles that had appeared there, he’d had another encounter with a different farmer, and it stuck with Keith.
He’d read about these strange lights appearing again and again in the sky around another South Australian town called Clare.
But when he made his way out there to investigate, no one was having a bar of opening up to some random teenager from out of town.
Keith Basterfield: It's only through the local newspaper editor who introduced us to one farmer, and then another farmer, and then another farmer.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Finally, introductions made, this farmer started to open up.
Keith Basterfield: And he said, ‘I want to tell you about what happened to me. I haven't spoken to many people about it’.
He said, ‘This is going to sound very, very strange and weird’.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The story he told started one morning in broad daylight with the farmer standing there in the barn.
Keith Basterfield: And he had a mental impression that he should go out and look up in the sky.
He said, ‘I can only describe it as a thought formed in my mind that I should go and look at the sky. And so I went outside, and in the clear blue sky I saw a pearl shaped object about the size of the full moon floating along very slowly, along a range of hills. There was no sound and it disappeared in the distance’.
And he said, ‘I feel silly talking about the fact that I had a mental impression to go and have a look at it’.
He said, ‘It was almost as if it wanted me to see it’.
And that always stuck with me as, what a thing to say.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The clear self-consciousness in this story strikes me. Like, the farmer is at pains to show that he knows this is a wild story.
This isn’t the last time that I’m going to hit this contradiction of someone very down to earth, telling a story about something that seems totally... unbelievable. Kinda like George and Albert.
And this contradiction feels very uncomfortable. It would be so much easier to categorise and process this story if the farmer was a clear kook.
I can imagine this was what people in Tully were grappling with when honest, hardworking George Pedley told them what he saw.
Danielle O'Neal: There are some people who would say UFOs are like almost the antithesis of science. No evidence, kind of pseudoscience. What do you say to that kind of perspective?
Keith Basterfield: I would challenge people to do their own fieldwork before they start putting alternate hypotheses together.
If your observations agree with your hypothesis, then you can turn your hypothesis into a theory.
Danielle O’Neal VO: As the reports of sightings proliferated there were some people, like Keith, trying to take a systematic approach to documenting and examining everything.
Archival news reporter: These slides are something special and they come in a special little kit called a UFO identification kit, complete with instructions.
Danielle O’Neal VO: This scientist, Dr Don Herbison Evans, even tried to get people to carry around this kit. He was like, let's just get the data.
Archival news reporter: Do you subscribe to the view that we are being visited by, uh, beings from other worlds?
Dr Don Herbison Evans: There's insufficient evidence to say yes or no.
Archival news reporter: You won't commit yourself?
Dr Don Herbison Evans: Not until we have much better evidence.
Danielle O’Neal VO: And this is the thing, whatever you think of the reports Keith was hearing, or those reports piling up over decades in the government’s UFO files overseen by the RAAF, the idea of at least trying to objectively verify and document and understand doesn't seem that wild.
But something was going to happen, a decade and a half after Tully kicked off, that would help banish this topic to the wastelands of scientific inquiry. Almost for good.
Archival news reporter: They've baffled scientists and UFO watchers. Gigantic circles appearing mysteriously overnight in England's cornfields.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Yep. More mysterious circles.
This time? On the other side of the world. A long way from Tully.
Peter Salleras: That was pretty quick to come on my radar and I thought, ‘Whoa, it's happening again’.
Danielle O’Neal VO: It was now the early 80s, fringes and polka dot dresses had been replaced by teased perms and spandex, and these mysterious circles that started appearing in England were given a new name.
One that would immortalise them in pop culture.
Crop Circles.
And suddenly, it wasn’t just locals in Tully coming up with theories about how they appeared.
Archival news reporter: The work of extraterrestrial higher intelligence. That's been the most popular theory.
Danielle O’Neal VO: And we’re not talking the odd circle here or there. We’re talking hundreds, across more than a decade.
Archival news reporter: These complex and beautiful patterns have turned up in fields of wheat or corn all over the world. And once someone does happen upon one, then everyone pipes up.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Was it people? Or were aliens leaving coded messages for humans in these crop designs?
Archival Raëlism believer: Mankind hasn't got the ability to create something like this. There is no doubt they are authentic.
Danielle O’Neal VO: These UK designs got way more intricate than the simple circles that were popping up in Australia. They're actually quite beautiful, these geometric patterns and swirls.
This was a major cultural moment. It'd spawned movies like 'Signs' with Mel Gibson years later.
That's about someone moving to a farm, where these crop circles start appearing and then he gets alarmed when alien activities start popping up around the world. I'm getting shades of Tully in that.
For a whole generation, crop circles became more than just an unexplained phenomena. They were a cultural icon. I mean, they were on a Led Zepplin album cover.
Anyway, they set off a firestorm of debate as scientists, UFO enthusiasts, and anyone with an opinion basically argued the toss about what might be behind them.
Nancy Talbot: One night observed columns, brilliant, brilliant tubes of light coming straight down from the sky, very quickly, which made a crop circle right in front of my eyes.
Doug Bower: How on earth intelligent people, professors et cetera, can just walk into a cornfield and see some flattened corn and make all this out of it over the years?
Nancy Talbot: We've slowly built up a huge number of field workers all over the world. There are several, there may be six, seven hundred of them now.
Danielle O’Neal VO: So, finally there were some scientists looking into this. And they were convinced there was something really weird happening.
This was Nancy Talbot, from a US research group dedicated to studying crop circles.
Nancy Talbot: We've examined in great depth, this is hundreds or thousands of plants taken from inside each one of the formations. What we have found are a number of changes in the plants which are consistent around the world. One is a node lengthening.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The node's like that raised bumpy bit on the stem of the plant.
Nancy Talbot: The second structural change are holes literally blown out at the nodes usually farther down the plant stem.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Wild right?
But, not everyone was on board with these explanations, with the hypothesis that it was ‘extra-terrestrial beings’ zooming down and leaving coded messages.
The whole topic had hit such fever pitch, that experts and defence peeps from all around the world were headed to the UK to get to the bottom of it.
It seems like at this moment a mainstream interest in investigating crop circles and UFOs, all these unexplained, unusual phenomena could have taken off.
If not for two men in a pub on a Friday night, who got bored with discussing watercolour painting.
Archival news reporter: Finally this morning, Britain's mysterious corn circles, which have appeared in fields across the country, are apparently the work of two ageing artists who've enjoyed deceiving scientists for the past 13 years.
Archival news reporter: Doug Bower and David Chorley say they're the brains behind the phenomenon.
Danielle O’Neal VO: A few beers in this particular Friday, Dave and Doug had this great idea, and it kinda snowballed.
Doug Bower: As the years rolled by we started doing certain patterns. And as you see today, we got quite complicated in them.
David Chorley: It was all fun, people were having fun. We had lovely art forms in fields.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Confronted with the evidence, a lot of people swallowed their pride and admitted they’d been wrong.
But there were people who insisted not all circles are the work of hoaxers. There still are.
I’d love to speak with Doug and Dave, it’s pretty nuts they managed to pull the wool over the eyes of pretty much everyone for more than a decade.
They’ve both died, but I get the sense from watching old footage they were just cheeky practical jokers.
Until they finally decided it was time to come clean. So they invited in the camera crews to watch them at work.
Doug Bower: The publicity gained in momentum as the years went by. And, well, you know what's happened since then.
I mean, 13, 13 years we've had it now. But when you reach the age of 67, you find you can't keep threading down corn year after year.
Archival news reporter: They used two wooden boards, a piece of string, and a sighting device attached to a baseball bat to carve corn circles that have baffled the experts for more than a decade.
David Chorley: We used to laugh, we used to talk to each other when we’re doing this. But all it is, is flattened corn. If you walk in, you've flattened it.
Archival news reporter: At the time there was a lot of interest in UFOs, and Doug remembered Queensland farmers making circles in their crops back in the 60s as a joke.
Danielle O’Neal VO: And here it is. They were inspired by what had happened in Tully. Except, that wasn’t a joke.
But now, decades on from the initial wave of ridicule that poured down on George and Albert, they were being pulled into an international hoaxing story.
Archival Patrick Delgado (scientist): This is a hoax and it is easy for us to see that it is a hoax.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Which only cast more doubt on George and Albert’s experience.
Within a week an Australian newspaper was phoning up the Pennisis. Checking in, ‘Are you sure yours are real?’.
George could move as much as he liked, but he couldn’t outrun what his innocent report back in January, 1966 had unleashed.
I’ve spent way too much time thinking about all this and what it meant for these down-to-earth farmers I met in Tully. Including talking it all through with my, very patient, husband.
Danielle O'Neal: Uh, I, like, I can totally respect Dave and Doug, the hoaxers, artistically - what an incredible sociological moment.
But far out, I can't help but kind of hate Dave and Doug for what they've done. They have made things so confusing. Like, you Google crop circles and it says, ‘They were made by supernatural forces named Dave and Doug’. That's a pretty amazing title from the New York Times, by the way.
Obviously they've both passed away now and I am sure they were wonderful people, but far out they make it hard to do a podcast about UFOs because their legacy still lives on.
Danielle O’Neal VO: When the news broke that two men in their 60s, that's Doug Bower and David Chorley, were ‘fessing up to a decades-long hoax that had hoodwinked some bright scientific minds, well let’s just say it didn’t go down brilliantly.
There were red faces and a fair share of 'I told you so's'. And it feels like all this really locked in this idea of a ‘them’ and ‘us’.
You were either a rational and thought it wasn’t worth exploring, or you were kind of a nut for believing there might be something to look into.
And somehow in the years since the whole crop circles, alien, UFO thing have all got wrapped up together into this thing that's weirdly controversial.
Like bring it up at family dinner and expect some weird reactions.
As I'm discovering when I tell people what project I'm working on.
When did we get so bad at listening to people with wildly different beliefs to our own?
I do wonder if it's partly that thing of once bitten twice shy. This hoax made a lot of people look pretty stupid. But actually, there are still unanswered questions about some circles. Like those ones in Tully.
But, it’s like we can't hold two truths at once in our minds. Its either a hoax, or its not. But maybe both can be true.
That cultural taint that cemented itself in the wake of the crop circle hoax reveal was something that researchers of UFOs or unusual phenomena had been pushing against for years.
That young, tanned surfer-looking guy on the failed road trip, Bill Chalker? He was diving deep, down the UFO rabbit hole.
By the 80s he was well on the way to becoming one of Australia’s chief UFO researchers.
Like Keith, Bill was just - how about some science?
Bill Chalker: Science should be about focusing and doing a careful examination of things, you know, open, open inquiry.
Danielle O’Neal VO: But, he knew all about the ‘UFO eyeroll’.
Bill Chalker: During the seventies, I found out about a UFO sighting that occurred back in 1970. We went into this area and found a classic burnt area about 30 feet wide.
It was a very clear-cut correlation with where this UFO had seemed to land.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Bill reached out to a scientist, explaining the intricacies of the case.
Bill Chalker: He said, it sounded like a classic case but you don't want to make that public.
You're better off saying that you're interested in witchcraft than flying saucers.
He knew that within the mainstream of the scientific research area, if you start to make yourself the focus of UFO enquiries then it doesn't bode well for your ongoing scientific career path.
Danielle O’Neal VO: It seems like the pop culture UFO depictions have majorly affected how the entire field is viewed. Or dismissed.
Something I've realised is that when I talk to people about UFOs, everyone has their own idea of what that acronym means.
Like UFOS - flying saucers full of little green men.
Or, like UFO as in literally unidentified flying object. Which, again, not that wild a concept. There's probably stuff out there we can't explain.
But things like E.T., or the X Files often mean that if we drop the clanger 'UFO' people fill in all these blanks with whatever cultural knowledge they have to hand.
Bill Chalker: Therein lies part of the problem. Unfortunately, a lot of it gets kind of minimalised and trashed by casual media engagement.
There's something worthwhile that's been recurring, that would benefit from serious scientific engagement.
Danielle O’Neal VO: But with people reluctant to put their name to anything with a whiff of paranormal, people like Bill stepped in to try to conduct whatever inquiry they could.
But 1981 found him bedbound, recovering from appendicitis, so Bill decided he could use the time to see if he could get access to the collection of all official UFO reported sightings in Australia.
The government's UFO files.
Bill thought;
Bill Chalker: What the hell, I'll start doing a ringing campaign to the Department of Defence and keep it up until I got a response.
It took literally over a year of a bit of, I get a letter back eventually saying, yes, you can have access to the files.
I think they were just expecting me to turn up, have a look at the files for an hour or two and go back home happy.
Danielle O’Neal VO: That's not what happened.
Bill Chalker: Got there promptly at 9am at the Russell offices. A very austere, concrete looking building,
Danielle O’Neal VO: Bill had dressed for the occasion. Gone were the cut off shorts and long blonde hair of a decade earlier.
Bill Chalker: I was there trying to ensure that I didn't come across as a, as a wild eyed kind of whatever, off the street kind of thing. Trying to convey that this was a serious investigation of the files. Short hair, a bit of a beard, tie.
I was shown through and given the vacant office of the Director of Public Relations of the Department of Defence. He was on Christmas holidays.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The secretary showing him in pointed out the photocopier if he needed it, then left Bill to settle in.
Bill Chalker: While I sat there waiting in comes the secretary and a couple of people dragging along these large postal sacks full of files.
And I thought, ‘Well, that's pretty unusual way of conveying files’.
But then I got them all out, organized them all on the desk, started to systematically go through them, basic details down to try and get an idea of what were they.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Then Bill heard these hurried footsteps coming.
The Secretary turned up and I was told that these files hadn't been declassified yet.
I shouldn't be looking at them.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Oops.
I mean I know it was the Christmas holidays, but doesn't someone check that stuff?
Bill Chalker: So they went off and some poor harried person had to spend the next hour or two hurriedly stamping every single page ‘declassified’ with an autograph and I just thought, you've got to be kidding.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The files eventually made their way back into the office. Declassified this time.
Sitting there sorting it all out for a week in this austere room, some of the files seemed pretty significant to Bill.
Bill Chalker: A file that referred to a report that was written in 1954 by a Melbourne based nuclear physicist, who had a security clearance, concluded that a residue of the data represented evidence of extraterrestrial craft.
And that was in a secret report to Air Force Intelligence in 1954.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Evidence of extraterrestrial craft? As in, like, Alien craft?
That's a big deal to be buried in this mess of files jumbled in postal sacks.
Ron Hunt: I saw this light come down
Valerie Keenan: Moved up and down, sideways
Shane Pennisi: Tilted, like it hesitated, and then gone.
Danielle O’Neal VO: These things we’re hearing about all happened decades ago, back when hard copies were the only copies.
I haven't seen this particular file for myself, but I’ve seen others and from the research I’ve done Bill’s experience in that director’s office stacks up.
And that wasn't even all of it.
Bill Chalker: I was able to establish on that first visit that I was probably examining about a third of the Department of Defence's UFO files.
Danielle O’Neal VO: What the hell was in the rest?
Bill wanted to find out exactly that. Armed with the information he had teased out of those postal sacks;
Bill Chalker: That allowed me to make very concrete requests for other specific files and over the space of two years, I documented in very fine detail what I found.
Danielle O’Neal VO: He knew there were things he wanted to get to the bottom of as he dug around in all these files. There was a case he was already aware of.
Bill Chalker: The North West Cape case from 1973.
Danielle O’Neal VO: North West Cape, a US military communications base.
All very top secret and hush hush. So much so that when he finally got access to those UFO files... this one was missing.
Luckily before that, he’d read this report from the deputy commander of the base.
Bill Chalker: Who was driving between the support to the base itself and he observes what appeared to be an object hovering over the mountains, that seemed to take off at extraordinary speed.
There was a separate report from an Australian fire captain working on the base. And he was just checking facilities and then he observes a dish shaped object with a sort of a disc around the bottom, like a satin ring-shaped around the bottom.
And it seemed to be hovering there for a while, and then it seemed to take off at extraordinary speed.
The reports were fairly close to each other in terms of timing. So we had two separate witnesses to what appears to be the same event.
It seemed to be unexplained to them.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Then the penny dropped.
Bill Chalker: The date of the sighting was on the same day as that base was used to issue a full nuclear alert to American forces within the Indian Pacific and Pacific region.
Danielle O’Neal VO: There is no way for me to tell if these things are linked. But it does seem like a coincidence.
Something unknown in the sky, in the middle of the Cold War mind you, and on the same day a nuclear alert is issued.
But all this information had been squirrelled away and seemingly forgotten.
Which seems odd. A nuclear alert is kinda a big deal.
Which makes what happened next surprising.
Brett Biddington: The logic drove me to eventually recommend that we desisted, or no longer, worried about unusual aerial sightings.
Danielle O’Neal VO: And there are a lot of people with thoughts about that.
Jeremey Corbell: You guys got to catch up in Australia.
Nobody wants to be the fool. Nobody wants to admit they've been lied to. Nobody wants to admit they've been lying.
Danielle O’Neal VO: I’m Danielle O’Neal and this is Uncropped, Season four of the ABC’s Expanse podcast.
Don't forget if you’re loving the show, follow it and tell your friends. It helps other people discover and enjoy it too.
I'm this season's host and producer. This episode was written by me and my supervising producer Piia Wirsu. Sound engineer and producer is Grant Wolter. Executive producer Blythe Moore. Thanks to Dominic Cansdale and Chris Calcino for additional production.
This podcast was recorded on Gulgnay and Iningai land.
Episode 4: UAP in the USA
Danielle O’Neal VO: Just a heads up, this episode has some strong language.
Brett Biddington: I was just flipping through the paper one morning and there was an ad. Are you interested to join the Air Force?
Danielle O’Neal VO: A young family man in Canberra, Brett Biddington was like, sure.
It was 1979, and he’d have to make a few adjustments.
Brett Biddington: Shave off a beard, I had to lose a bit of weight.
Danielle O’Neal VO: But sign him up.
Brett Biddington: I was minding our little baby girl. I'd had a beard for quite a long time. I thought she's got to figure out that I'm the same person before and after.
So, I sat her in the high chair and made her watch me as it were while I cut it off. And I think at the end of the day she was saying come on, Dad, do that again.
She thought it was a hoot.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Clean-cheeked and through the selection process, Brett became a junior intelligence officer.
And by the mid 80s his remit? Check out these weird UFO sightings.
The RAAF had years of these sightings all logged and recorded and young surfer-come-UFO-researcher Bill Chalker had discovered some very interesting cases buried in those archives.
And then there was that full nuclear alert that coincided with the day an unidentified flying object was spotted over a US military communications base.
To people like Bill, it seemed more important than ever to look into whatever was going on. But, something was coming that would bring investigations to a screaming halt.
A decision that would shape Australia’s ability to investigate unidentified things in the sky. For decades.
All the while? Serious concern about them would brew in the U.S..
I'm Danielle O'Neal and this is Season four of Expanse: Uncropped. Episode four: UAPs in the US-of-A.
With the RAAF’s UFO files getting thicker by the day, a part of Brett’s job was looking into reports made by ordinary people. People like George Pedley.
But he’s pretty clear, the RAAF was less interested in little green men. But they were very interested in what the major powers space capabilities were. This was the height of the Cold War, remember?
Chasing UFOs might not be what he expected when he joined the Air Force, but he took it seriously all the same.
Brett Biddington: It was a weekend and on the Saturday night there was a young man who was the disc jockey on a local commercial radio station, Bendigo.
Quite a few people rang into this radio station to say, we're seeing these really strange lights. Can you explain?
One caller led to another caller led to another caller.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Brett had taken his family away for the weekend. When they got home Sunday night they were greeted by the phone ringing.
Brett Biddington: Brett, tomorrow morning, first thing in the boss's office we need to figure out what we're going to do with all these reports about unusual aerial sightings in and around Bendigo.
Danielle O’Neal VO: By Tuesday morning, Brett was in a RAAF car making his way through the fog to Bendigo.
Brett Biddington: Several of the commercial TV channels had simply taken their helicopters and flown above the clouds, so they were all there waiting, cameras set up.
I get out of the car, ‘Flight lieutenant, what, what, what can you tell us?’.
I said, ‘Nothing yet, I haven't even spoken to the man who made the sightings’.
It must have been a pretty slow news week, because very quickly it was all over the Melbourne papers.
The question then was, well, what was the RAAF going to do about this?
Danielle O’Neal VO: So, Brett, even though he was a junior officer, fronted up on talk TV.
Brett Biddington: And the big question at the end was, ‘So flight lieutenant, do you think there are aliens in the universe?’.
And I said, ‘I wouldn't use that language. Given the vastness of the universe, the likelihood of life other than on earth has to be conceded as probable, but we don't know’.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Brett’s really got no interest in the whole ‘aliens’ thing. He was there to do a job. Even if that job was somewhat hampered by the media.
Brett Biddington: It tends to be both sensationalised and somewhat trivialised in the general media.
As I recall, uh, had a headline at one point that the Air Force confiscated the imagery taken by the young man in Bendigo. Now we didn't confiscate his imagery.
I asked him if he would allow me to take that film to our central photographic establishment and see if we could make any sense of it for him.
But of course, that doesn't make a good story to sell newspapers.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Brett never got to the bottom of what caused the lights that started this whole circus. He reckons it was probably something to do with a temperature inversion layer though. So, basically weather.
But he did start to notice something else that happened after these big media hypes.
Brett Biddington: There was a multiplier effect. And that multiplier effect snowballed. So, we had a number of other people then deciding to report things too.
Danielle O’Neal VO: This is something I’ve heard about elsewhere as well. That media coverage prompts other, similar reports of unusual aerial phenomena.
Which has me wondering, is this all just some kind of social contagion? All in the mind? Each outbreak started by one person and spread by the media?
People seeing things because they’re expecting to see something there.
Or are people just using the cultural information available to them at the time to make sense of something that’s ultimately inexplicable to their brains?
Maybe they are really observing something, but because they can’t understand it their brains fill in the blanks with information from Lost in Space, or the X-Files.
Brett Biddington: The people I dealt with from, if you will, the general public were mostly articulate thoughtful quite convinced that they'd seen something that they had no explanation for.
Danielle O’Neal VO: This is what I’ve found too. But does believing something’s true, make it true?
Or could our brains just be filling in the gaps of our experience in ways that feel 100% reality. But that are just down to neurons firing to try and organise our experiences into something we can understand?
Over the years, Brett looked into dozens of reports.
They largely turned out to be nothing more than weather or other mundane things. And the ones that were unexplained was usually because there wasn’t enough information to come to a conclusion.
So, nearing the end of the Cold War, Brett was under the squeeze from higher ups.
Basically? The call was that the RAAFs money should go to fighting wars and stuff.
Brett Biddington: Unusual aerial sightings, when there's no evidence of any threat that is extraterrestrial, was not core business.
The logic drove me to eventually recommend to the chief of the Air Force that we desisted or no longer worried about unusual aerial sightings.
Danielle O’Neal VO: So that was it. Nothing to see here. It was cased closed.
To be clear, the RAAF was the place to report unexplained sightings. The authority. So closing up, meant closing up any official governmental investigative agency.
Brett agrees there were some sightings he or the RAAF couldn’t explain. He just doesn’t think they were that interesting.
Brett Biddington: You can't make the logic leap to say that because I can't explain it, what I'm seeing is a threat to national security.
Danielle O'Neal: There would be some people who say that those kinds of sightings of unexplained things in the sky, by their kind of very nature, might be a risk to air force and aircraft. And therefore be relevant to the RAAF, and kind of then make the logic that that is a reason to keep investigating to understand them?
Brett Biddington: You can make that argument. But so far, to my knowledge, the Air Force has never lost an aircraft to an unexplained aerial object.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Yep. Fair.
This is where I feel torn again. What Brett’s saying is very reasonable. But the decision to close the RAAF files meant the only real means to report sightings was now through civilian-run interest groups, or the police - who have other things to be getting on with.
And those civilian groups don’t really come with the same legitimacy. And it seems like not many of them are still that functional now.
So, no longer any single entity actually looking at all these weird happenings. Our government was just like... Nah don’t worry about it.
And there were some people who were very riled up about that. Who thought there’d been a cover-up about the whole thing.
Even after all the UFO files were released to the National Archives for transparency.
Brett Biddington: No matter what we do, there'll always be people who'll say, ‘Oh yes, but there's another file that you haven't shown us’.
I can't, there's no way I can counter that.
Danielle O'Neal: Do you think in those instances you're almost being asked to prove something that's unprovable? That there is no cover up?
Brett Biddington: Ah, that's right. It is unprovable.
Danielle O’Neal VO: This is the thing with conspiracy thinking, there is no way to prove there isn’t a cover-up.
And it sounds like that’s what Brett was up against.
I can understand why people have questions about cover-ups, have a seed of doubt.
Because in recent history there have been big, trusted institutions who’ve been caught out doing just that.
But, one of the basic tenants of the scientific method is that a valid hypothesis has to be able to be disproved.
So these claims of cover-ups or missing films, which can’t be? That’s really problematic.
Thousands of ks away, on the other side of the world, they're a long way from and shutting down investigations.
And understanding what’s happening there makes me wonder, if George had made the report he did now would he have gotten a different response?
There’s one person I feel like I have to talk to, to see just how differently all this is treated in America.
By the public.
By the media.
Even by the government.
Jeremy Corbell: Come here. Come say hi.Up. This is Wiley. Wiley, like Wiley coyote.
He goes with me everywhere. He's such a sweetie. Hold on, that’s your leg. Okay. Get the mic. Lay down. Lay down, boy.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Jeremy Corbell has quite a reputation in the UFO scene in the states.
Jeremy Corbell: I'm like everybody else. I'm curious as fuck to what's going on with this mystery.
Danielle O’Neal VO: When I video called Jeremy, I was expecting the big black safe over his right shoulder... I was not necessarily expecting cute dog chat.
Jeremy Corbell: And, by the way, the weirdest thing about Wiley he fucking tracks planes.
And he'll just start barking at anything that's high flying. He's obsessed with it too.
He learned from daddy.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Jeremy kinda fell into film making when his mixed martial arts career ground to a halt due to illness.
And then he kinda fell into investigating UFOs and all sorts of fringe stuff.
But the groundwork for all that was laid way back when he was, by his own admission, an out of control 13-year-old.
It was 1989, the world wide web was just beginning to be developed, and Jeremy was under the covers, in his bedroom with walls painted purple listening to his gunmetal grey boom box.
Jeremy Corbell: It was like this big rectangular box with two big speakers on the side.
And you could tune in to, you know, Coast to Coast AM, this late-night show.
I heard on the radio that this guy named Bob Lazar being interviewed. And he talked about the way that these flying saucers travelled.
He kind of sounded like a nerd.
‘Well, there were nine flying saucers’.
What stuck with me was this one thing he said. He's like, ‘Imagine if you have a mattress and you put a bowling ball on that mattress, and then you take your fist and you push down on the mattress and the bowling ball just falls towards the divot you've created with your fist’.
He's like, ‘That's how the craft work’.
All of a sudden, what he said, if it was true, what he said made that space irrelevant and everybody was wrong.
And I remember being 13 years old thinking, ‘You know, just because someone tells you something doesn't mean it's true’.
It was like a revelation, you know, that authorities don't necessarily have the right answers all the time.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Bob Lazar is pretty widely considered to be a conspiracy theorist by the mainstream.
His is a whole other story, look it up if you’re interested.
But, hearing these ideas that challenged so much of what he knew and understood, it flipped Jeremy’s script.
Jeremy Corbell: It made me realize all of a sudden that the vastness of the universe, the vastness of space, the potential for life out there, other beings, other civilizations, that not only is that likely and possible and statistically probable, but the ability of other advanced technological civilizations to contact earth is incredibly possible.
And that we had been given the wrong narrative.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Hearing this it starts to make sense to me how he ended up making films about UFOs.
And much like the investigators in Australia I’ve spoken to, Jeremy says that once people realised he was taking them seriously, really there to hear their account without judgement, they started trusting him.
Jeremy Corbell: My camera became my passport into talking with people.
I just noticed that, I noticed that people would reveal shit that they wouldn't even reveal to their families. So, it was powerful.
You know, it was a weapon that this camera became this thing that people would talk to.
Danielle O’Neal: And so how do you get from there to having these significant things being leaked to you?
Jeremy Corbell: (Laughs) I don't fucking know.
I'm a place where people can come and they can trust that I will keep their secret and I will not report on it and they can even put themselves at risk and I'm not going to burn them.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Over the years, more people opened up to Jeremy. He started to get tip offs and leaks.
Jeremy Corbell: I've been lucky. I've obtained a lot of the stuff you see in the news. I obtain and release footage as a journalist that may be leaked to me.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Then Jeremy got hold of a story that he knew was different. This was big. If he could confirm it, it could change the conversation.
Which is what found him his house in California, making a very important call to a highly decorated US Navy pilot, Commander David Fravor.
Jeremy Corbell: I was like halfway in my closet just to get better sound and better reception.
Danielle O’Neal VO: He was nervous, this was a hell of a cold call to make.
Jeremy Corbell: I got his number from another military buddy of his and he's like dude, I don't think he's gonna talk with you.
Because imagine me, known for UFO movies, calling up a very decorated Navy commander who guarded Los Angeles during 9/11 in his fighter jet.
Hey, bro, what's up? I'm Jeremy the UFO guy. Would you mind telling me your deepest and darkest secrets that the world doesn't know about yet that you saw a UFO and actually engaged it and chased it. How about that man?
Danielle O’Neal VO: Worth a shot, I guess.
So, Jeremey, half in this closet, dialed the number on his mobile phone.
Jeremy Corbell: I was probably nervous.
I got some encouragement from other military friends of mine. ‘You can this like, you know, VFA 41, that's the Black ACEs, know your numbers, know his call sign, try to be very direct, not curt’.
He's like, ‘Why the fuck you call me? How'd you get my number?’.
It didn't start off good, but I just told him that I was genuinely interested that I'm not going to go to the newspapers. I'm not going to tell people about it.
At some point I think he could see I was genuine and sincere about it.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Jeremy had been lucky, he’d caught Fravor on the drive home. Nowhere else for him to be, no one to blow him off for.
Over a few calls they built up trust, Jeremy always calling when he knew Fravor would be in the car.
Fravor remembers these calls well.
Commander Fravor: I'd be in my truck just driving north home and, and we would just have these conversations. And for a while he begged to, ‘Can I record these? Can I record these?’.
And I said, no, you cannot record these. So, we had a lot of conversations about stuff.
Danielle O’Neal VO: And so Jeremy heard this unbelievable story from an incredibly believable, straight, Navy commander.
Jeremy Corbell: Commander Fravor chased the Tic Tac UFO.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Yep, chased a UFO. In his Navy jet.
Jeremy Corbell: So, when Commander Fravor came back to the ship, he says, go get it, you know, go film it.
Danielle O’Neal VO: So this then lieutenant, Lieutenant Underwood, heads up in this machine that has all this fancy filming gear on it.
Jeremy Corbell: So, what you see in the Tic Tac UFO looks like a cylindrical blob that that's sitting there in space. And he's switching through different visuals to try to get as much information as he can for the Navy intelligence people who are going to analyze this UFO.
And then this thing just shot off. And then they found it on another radar at an impossible distance away in an impossibly short amount of time. So that's the Tic Tac UFO.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The Tic Tac UFO. So called because this thing looked like a tic tac in the sky.
Jeremy Corbell: We knew that the Tic Tac UFO case was paramount and it was epic and it was new.
Danielle O’Neal VO: It took a few years, but a video of this did end up hitting the headlines. It was published by the New York times in 2017.
Within 15 minutes, Fravor’s phone was ringing.
Commander Fravor: And I said, ‘Hey dude, what's up?’. And he said, ‘You are an effing idiot.’
I said, ‘Uh, what are you talking about?’
He says, ‘Dude, I just came in and I turned on my iPad.’
He goes, ‘And you're all over it’.
Danielle O’Neal VO: It captured the world's attention.
Danielle O’Neal: How significant was it then that the mainstream media engaged with it?
Jeremy Corbell: Well, very significant. It was like beating a drum. Like the movie don't look up.
You're like, ‘Hey guys, UFOs are real. It's important’. And like, you know, no one’s listening.
So then all of a sudden you get participation by mainstream media and it's like a, a ball rolling downhill. It just starts gaining momentum.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Yep, sure did. The US Navy would confirm that the video was authentic.
Jeremy’s instinct about this tip was right.
In the years after, other American naval pilots would go public with their own UFO encounters during flights.
It seems like the tide was turning in the states. This whole topic was moving out of the fringes and more into the mainstream.
And that Times article is heralded by many as the turning point for when the taboo on talking about UFOs started to lift.
And the US government? They were interested.
On August 14, 2020 the US Department of Defense confirmed that they had kicked off a task force focused purely on looking into UFOs. Only now, they’re called UAP – Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
Fast forward a year and a report was released, long and boring name, but basically it was an intelligence assessment of the threat posed by UAP.
It is literally the top line that the lack of high-quality reporting makes it pretty hard to reach any hard and fast conclusions. But you don’t have to go a whole lot further down for this.
Report (Read): UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security.
Danielle O’Neal VO: The main concerns are about cluttered airspace and ‘foreign adversaries’ having some new gadgets the US doesn’t know about. They’re certainly not naming up aliens.
But national security challenge? That seems like strong language whatever way you spin it.
Meanwhile in Australia... it seems a bit da di da di dah.
A couple of months later, in October 2021, a Tasmanian Greens Senator started asking questions.
Prompted by that report, and a trusted friend from the Defence forces who had also experienced something bizarre and unexplained, Senator Peter Whish-Wilson wanted to know what exactly the Australian Department of Defence was doing.
Short answer? Not much.
No. The Department of Defence had not formally reviewed the report.
No. Defence Force personnel have no protocol for reporting UFOs or UAP or whatever you want to call them up the military chain.
Senator Whish-Wilson wasn’t done though.
A year later, he was back at it in senate estimates.
Peter Whish-Wilson: Are you aware of military exercises being canceled because of concerns around air safety and observations of UAPs?
Penny Wong: Is, is this a UFO question?
Danielle O’Neal VO: Clearly Senator Penny Wong did not feel the same sense of urgency.
Peter Whish-Wilson: You could call them a UFO if you like, Senator. Wong. They're, they're called, they're now technically classified unidentified aerial phenomena.
Penny Wong: Just so I am clear
Peter Whish-Wilson: Do you think it's funny?
Penny Wong: I haven't been here for. I don't think I have been asked questions about this.
Peter Whish-Wilson: That’s okay, well I am asking.
Penny Wong: Can we assist at all, the senator, with this line of questioning?
Danielle O’Neal VO: His fellow senators may have been bemused, but Whish-Wilson did get an answer from the Chief of Airforce.
Chief of Airforce: I am aware that there is reports due in the United States. If there is anything in that reporting that raises anything, that would be a concern to us in our airspace, then we'll take that seriously.
Peter Whish-Wilson: Since you've taken over as Chief of Air Force, um, in what capacity, if any at all, have you been, uh, briefed on, on the UAP, um, phenomena since, since you've taken over the role in July?
Chief of Airforce: Um, Senator, I haven't had any specific briefings in relation to UAP since I've taken over.
Danielle O’Neal VO: A bunch of freedom of information documents from the Department of Defence, released in 2022 and 23, also make for some interesting reading.
Key points? Since Brett’s recommendation shut down the Air Force's handling of UFO reports back in the 90s there’s been no systematic gathering of the public’s intel.
The Department of Defence doesn't even have a policy that covers the internal reporting of UAP. They did have one, but it was canned in 2013.
They’re basically like, well no one was making reports. So, why would we investigate something that doesn’t appear to be happening? Let alone actually be a problem?
I can’t help but compare this to what was happening in the States over roughly the same time.
The media coverage here was less New York Times serious report, more pop it in for some colour.
One news article even says Whish-Wilson is ‘pursuing the matter of little green men from Mars’.
Jeremy Corbell: I notice when I go in Australia and I go on like new shows they always try to play play that X-Files music at the beginning.
I've told them, I've told them over and over, we're past that now. You guys got to catch up in Australia.
The world's changing and the information base is growing. And if you don't know, you got to catch up.
Danielle O’Neal VO: So, while America is labelling UAP as a national security concern and throwing government resources at it, in Australia we’re playing X-File themes and looking the other way?
Penny Wong: Is, is this a UFO question?
Danielle O’Neal VO: Is there something they know we don’t?
While all this back and forwards was flying in Australian senate estimates, thrilling stuff I know, Jeremy Corbell was sitting in a bar with a journalist he’s been working with and mentored by for a long time, George Knapp.
Ever the documentary filmmaker, he’s got his camera rolling on George.
Jeremy Corbell: I think he was just at the bar having a beer as we were sitting there, but I just happened to be rolling at that time and David Grush leans in.
Danielle O’Neal VO: Jeremy had no idea who this bloke was. But soon the name David Grusch would explode across the global headlines.
Approaching them cold, he has something he needs to tell them. They want to hear him out, so they order some more drinks.
This clean-cut military man tells them he's an Airforce veteran who's been working an as intelligence officer reporting to an American government program investigating UFO sightings.
Yeah, that program. The one that set off all Senator Whish-Wilson's UAP zest.
Jeremy Corbell: He wanted journalists who are savvy in this field to know that that he was going to file a complaint, whistleblower complaint. And it was about the UFO cover up.
Danielle O’Neal VO: What he claimed to know was pretty out there. Even compared to some of the things Jeremy had heard over the years.
Jeremy was skeptical. He'd had lots of people contact him with false agendas.
Jeremy Corbell: There are people that make contact with journalists like me and George that on appearance, they work for one agency and show credentials and cool, what do you have to say?
And then on back end digging, come to find out they work for other agencies.
The Intel guys say it's the hall of mirrors.
Danielle O’Neal VO: So here in this southern bar, Jeremy is trying to get a sense on if he can trust this guy.
Jeremy Corbell: I'm kind of the harpoon, go out, throw a bunch of drinks down someone's throat, get to the bullet test of if they are who they say they are, you know, that kind of thing.
Between George and me, we were able to go find a bunch of our sources and find out: Legitimate. 100%.
He is who he says he is. He did the things that he said he did. And he had the access that he told us he did.
From there, the rest is history.
Danielle O’Neal VO: This guy doesn’t want just them to know about this alleged cover up.
He thinks the world needs to know what’s living in his head.
But all three of them also know, this will change everything.
Jeremy Corbell: And it was a long conversation back and forth is, is this the right thing for him to do?
Is this the thing that's going to do the best for America, but also for the global public, but also for his own personal life.
Is this like, really, you want to put your head above the parapet? Is this the time?
It's a pretty wild world and we knew he'd be attacked. And we all agreed it was the right thing to do at this time.
Danielle O’Neal VO: So, what happened next?
Jeremy Corbell: I need a beer for this one.
Danielle O’Neal VO: This is Uncropped, Season four of ABC’s Expanse podcast.
If you’re loving the show follow it and tell your friends, it helps other people discover and enjoy it too.
I’m Danielle O’Neal, host and producer. This episode was written by me and my supervising producer Piia Wirsu, Sound engineer and producer is Grant Wolter. Executive producer Blythe Moore. Thanks to Dominic Cansdale and Chris Calcino for additional production.
This podcast was recorded on Gulgnay and Iningai land.
No transcript has been posted on the last episode 5: The legacy
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